Month by Month 05: May
The flowering of fruit trees has ended, as has that of oilseed rape. Where acacias are present, a certain amount of luck is required: the flower needs 19 °C to open and water to produce nectar. Fine, sunny weather with a clear sky—meaning cold nights and days influenced by the bise—causes the flowers to remain stubbornly closed. When warmth is present and accompanied by drought, the flowers are wide open but produce no nectar. Acacia honey is therefore often unpredictable in our regions; in Hungary, a major producer of this honey, breeding has made it possible to obtain acacias with later flowering.
The colonies
The control of varroa mites is continued using trap combs placed under the super frame positioned at the edge of the brood nest. Once additional supers are added, this operation becomes almost impossible. Although trapping can in principle be continued, the increasing weight of the supers becomes a strong deterrent. The population is now increasing rapidly; when warmth follows the cold spell at the beginning of the month, swarming is under way or may already have occurred, as April was favourable. Artificial swarms will therefore be created.
Swarm traps are placed a few metres from the apiary and slightly elevated. A thorough pass with a blowtorch to reactivate colony odours, together with a few old frames, are essential complements to ensure the inevitable attraction of swarms. If no swarm is captured, one will at least have the pleasure of finding wax moths, much to the delight of anglers.
Placing the supers
This is the time to place supers—already in April if the colonies are at full strength and the nectar flow is abundant. These supers receive the surplus honey produced by an excess of foragers. This means that a super should be added when the brood chamber is completely occupied, or when bees begin storing honey there, which should be avoided as far as possible.
If weather conditions allow a massive influx of nectar, the queen’s egg laying will be restricted by the disorderly storage of nectar wherever space is available. This occurs in areas where young bees have just emerged, preventing the queen from laying there. Adding the super too late risks blocking the queen’s laying and triggering swarming; adding it too early cools the colony, and the queen’s laying suffers when she does not move up to lay in the super. The super must therefore be added at the precise moment when the population is excessive and before nectar competes with available brood space.
When?
This moment can be assessed in several ways. It is when the colony fully occupies eight frames, when the outer frames are filling with nectar, or when they are heavily covered with bees. A quick inspection of the outer frames does not disturb the colony and takes little time. Another indicator is the appearance of white wax constructions on the top bars of the frames and on the inner cover.
For beekeepers who find it difficult to monitor their hives regularly, supers can be placed on a board pierced with a hole of about 30 mm in diameter, itself placed on the brood chamber. This board retains heat while allowing bees to access the super when needed. This small trick is more effective than newspaper or kraft paper, which were formerly recommended. In practice, bees quickly perforate paper regardless of colony development and weather conditions.
With highly prolific strains, place a super on the brood chamber as early as possible, followed by a queen excluder and a second super at the same time. If the excluder is poorly tolerated by the bees (limited passage, honey stored in the brood chamber), remove it. If the queen then moves up and lays eggs in various places, so be it. Creating space by adding supers is one of the best methods for limiting swarming in properly selected lines. Toward the end of the month, the whole arrangement is reorganised: brood frames are grouped in one super, capped honey frames in another, and uncapped honey frames in a super placed as close as possible to the brood chamber.
If flowering and weather conditions are favourable, a first harvest is possible at the end of the month. Did you note, for each hive, the number of brood frames at the beginning of April? Record for each hive the number of full honey frames in the super at the end of May, and you will see in July at harvest time that the number of frames harvested from each hive is proportional to these figures, a rule that you will verify year after year. You will better understand why having strong colonies for overwintering is so important.
Queen rearing
This is the time to begin. Good manuals provide the necessary guidance, but I would like to encourage those who hesitate. For a small apiary and the production of two or three dozen queens per year in May and June, it seems straightforward to work with a queenless nucleus hive. The small population size of a nucleus makes it easy to find the queen at the appropriate moment. The frame bearing the queen is removed and placed in a nucleus with another frame of sealed brood and its bees taken from elsewhere, all well scented with colony odour. This small population, an artificial swarm, is set aside, preferably in another apiary, to prevent foragers from accidentally finding their queen and calling back the bees of the nucleus, which would then become depopulated.
In the queenless nucleus, where one frame is missing, the grafting frame is placed in the centre. By replacing each week two frames devoid of bees (often filled with honey) with frames of sealed brood without their bees taken from other colonies, the population is renewed. The nurse bees, having no other larvae to feed than those provided, will take care of the queen cups. Acceptance rates then become very high, on the order of 90 to 95 %. Every ten days the cells are collected and newly grafted cups are introduced.
This simple method, once mastered, has one drawback. The nucleus maintained in a queenless state and supplied with bees from different colonies becomes very aggressive, making it essential to keep this breeding equipment well away from any uncooperative neighbours.
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Other articles: ► Renewing colonies and queens |